Animals were always part of the earth: what the Bible says about animal suffering

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This is the study companion to the video "What About Animal Suffering? Reacting to @TheChurchSplit," where I watched my friend Will Hess of The Church Split answer one of the sharpest objections to Christianity going around right now, and paused every few minutes to push, agree, and add. It is for two kinds of people. The first is the person who buried a dog or a horse or a cat and asked a pastor where that animal went, and got a shrug, or worse, a short lecture about souls. The second is the person who has heard Alex O'Connor press this question, felt the force of it, and never told anyone that they did not have an answer. If either of those is you, welcome. Bring the question in with you.

How to use it: watch the video first if you can. Then open your Bible, ideally with a King James Version beside whatever you normally read, because one of the things you are going to check is printed in the margin of an old KJV. Read "The teaching" straight through; it carries the whole argument on its own. Then work "The passages" slowly, with a pen, reading every quotation in your own Bible and following the cross-references. Save "Questions to sit with" for last and answer them on paper.

One thing before we start. Being right about animals does not save anyone. Faith in Christ saves you. I have friends all over the map on this, people who love the Lord and love their neighbors and think I am being fanciful, and I am not breaking with any of them over it. So hold this study loosely in one sense and seriously in another: let the text convince you if it convinces you, and stay kind toward the people who read it differently.

It matters because the story you believe you are living in is the story you will live out. If the ending you carry around is an evacuation, souls lifted out of a world that gets thrown away, then every creature that ever suffered in this world is simply lost, and a piece of your heart already knows that cannot be squared with a good God. If the ending is this world healed, the question changes shape entirely. Same Bible. Two very different ways to grieve, and two very different ways to hope.